This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A good write-up on a detransition study by the PI (Well, it's a cogent write-up, on its own; I didn't check if it was faithful to the study.)
They subtyped detransition into "Detransitioning with regret," 'Identity evolutions," "Transition ambivalence,' and "Interrupted gender transitions." The biggest surprise to me was the last subtype, since the others were pretty much what you'd expect. (Or, at least, what I'd expected.)
The write-up has a lot of tables and graphs, so block quotes aren't very effective.
To paraphrase the author, this is higher quality information than we had, previously, but the study can't tell us how to use that information... So, how would a utilitarian interpret this? Or a deontologist, virtue ethicist, contractualist, contractarianist, etc?
There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be? Not yet reconciling yourself to the fact that your trans? What If a person has never thought they were trans? Is this just "internalized" something something. This is one of my biggest epistemic problems with the Trans people and the Woke people; they posit to understand everyone's true, latent motivations better than the individuals do. They're saying the can read the 'true' mind inside my mind and, furthermore, that their generalizations in this recursive mind reading are broadly applicable to society. "Everyone has, to some extent, internalized racism. They may not know it, however." Wow. What an assertion.
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place? If I have a strongly head opinion on any issue, I'm probably going to try persevere even in the face of resistance and lack of support. I can understand the healthcare argument where a cancer patient, for instance, fails because they're just too weak. But the whole thing about transitioning is that there are no maladies in the body, just a desire to change it.
If we open the aperture to say that "emotional strength" is required to transition and that the actions of others can damage a person's "emotional strength" and, furthermore, that this is a valid reason for interrupting or quitting a course of action then how in the actual hell is anyone ever responsible for anything?. If "It made me feel bad so I quit" is acknowledged as "valid" then every deadbeat dad is forever absolved, every addict in recovery who relapses is a saint, every smash-and-grab thief is an understandable hardship case.
I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that much of society rests on the idea that everyone will, at multiple points in their lives, feel bad but that good behavior is still required even with the reality of negative emotional states. By medicalizing this "experience" (as the report explicitly does), we're opening pandora's box to the medicalizing of subjective emotional states. As I've written before:
My pitch regarding subsidies for transition is that every citizen should be entitled from birth to a finite "morphological freedom budget", calculated to cover gender reassignment plus detransition. A trans person can cash it in to transition (with just enough left over to detransition if they change their mind); an ordinary person can use the money on whatever other elective plastic surgery they want. But once you're out you're out, and further expenses are on you.
What about those of us who aren't weirdos, can we just take the money and spend on a nice house, a couple cars, and retiring early?
One of the more facile arguments made by trans activists is that lots of banal things cis people do all the time technically fall under the domain of "gender-affirming": building muscle mass, getting hair transplants, whatever. The cost of a single penectomy or vaginoplasty would probably cover a lifetime's gym membership and a return trip to Turkey.
The reason it's a facile argument is because the reason I do strength training is because I want to be stronger, more attractive and to make sad head voice quiet, not because I want to more "fully embody my masculine gender identity" or whatever. But it's not like I'd object if my gym membership was subsidised by the taxpayer. I could even imagine a hypothetical world in which such a policy represented a public saving in the long run, if paying for people's gym memberships made them more likely to exercise and in turn less likely to suffer from cardiac disease and obesity-related illnesses. Maybe the lower BMIs, improved muscle tones and higher sex drives that would result from a higher proportion of the population exercising regularly would even improve fertility rates. But my gym membership costs me less than €40 a month, which according to ChatGPT is pretty typical: I find it hard to imagine the monetary expense is a leading factor in why so many people are sedentary.
It's funny to imagine a world in which @WandererintheWilderness's nonsensical policy is put into practice and used to pay for penectomies, phalloplasties and gym memberships. Improving the inclusive genetic fitness of one large demographic while sterilising another, under the exact same policy.
Not as a rational cost-benefit thing, but I think a government subsidy could plausibly manipulate significant numbers into taking advantage of the opportunity, due to the human tendency to not want to "miss out" on a free lunch. Think of all the people who stuff themselves at buffets on free snacks they'd never touch if they had to pay for them, even for cheap. If people were told "you have [X] thousand dollars in the bank, they're yours, but they'll revert to the government unless you spend them on one of gym, hair-dyes, plastic surgery, etc." I think that would in fact increase demand for each of those items as people rush to get what's 'theirs'.
And I don't think it's fair to call my proposed policy "nonsensical" even as you grant that it might be net-positive and that you might like to take advantage of it yourself if it was on the table! Unorthodox, yes; implausible in the short term; but hardly nonsensical.
Well, the point I was making was that I think a positive side effect of such a policy might be that it encourages more people to become fit and healthy, which would pay down dividends in terms of public health expenditure and improved fertility rates. A policy which enables mentally ill people to chop perfectly healthy tissue and organs off of themselves at the taxpayers' expense (and then attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible several years down the line, likewise at the taxpayers' expense) does strike me as nonsensical, even if such a policy was sufficiently broadly-worded as to also include paying for members of the public to become more fit and healthy.
Put simply: would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gender-affirming care and detransition procedures at the taxpayers' expense (option 1)? No, I think that's silly and dumb, in much the same way as publicly subsidised boob jobs and lip fillers would be (in fact, much of the time we would be talking about literally the same procedures). Would I support such a policy if it also included publicly subsidised gym memberships (option 2)? Again, no, but it would be silly not to take advantage of it if it was already in place. Would I support a policy of publicly subsidised gym membership (perhaps under the use-it-or-lose-it model you describe)? Yes, I could be persuaded that such a policy passes a cost-benefit analysis, in a way I simply couldn't with option 1.
"The government will pay for you to chop off pieces of your own body, and will then pay for you to restore them years later after you've decided it was a bad idea" sounds like a conservative parody of wasteful public expenditure, analogous to a self-licking ice cream cone or paying people to dig holes in the ground then fill them up again. It would be exactly as nonsensical as paying people to get fit and healthy and also paying for them to sit on their couches eating ice cream.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link